The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
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List of the most influential people in Mathematics,
#2151
Abraham Lempel
#2831
Overall Influence
1936 - 2023 (87 years)
Abraham Lempel was an Israeli computer scientist and one of the fathers of the LZ family of lossless data compression algorithms. Biography Lempel was born on 10 February 1936 in Lwów, Poland . He studied at Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, and received a B.Sc. in 1963, an M.Sc. in 1965, and a D.Sc. in 1967. Since 1977 he held the title of full professor, and was a professor emeritus at Technion.
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Domina Eberle Spencer
#36323
Overall Influence
1920 - 2022 (102 years)
Domina Eberle Spencer was an American mathematician who was Professor at the University of Connecticut. Spencer was born on September 26, 1920, and earned her Ph.D. in 1942 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the supervision of Dirk Jan Struik. She worked on electrodynamics and field theory.
Go to Profile#2153
Gheorghe Păun
#29552
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Gheorghe Păun is a computer scientist from Romania, prominent for work on membrane computing and the P system. Păun studied mathematics at the University of Bucharest, obtaining an MSc. in 1974 and a PhD in 1977 under the direction of Solomon Marcus. He has been a researcher at the Institute of Mathematics of the Romanian Academy since 1990. Păun was elected a member of the Academia Europaea in 2006, and a titular member of the Romanian Academy in 2012. He supervised the PhD thesis of 5 students. In 2016, he was awarded the title of Doctor Honoris Causa Scientiarum.
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Charles E. M. Pearce
#29420
Overall Influence
1940 - 2012 (72 years)
Charles Edward Miller Pearce was a New Zealand/Australian mathematician. At the time of his death on 8 June 2012 he was the Elder Professor of Mathematics at the University of Adelaide. Early life Pearce was born in Wellington. His early schooling was in Wellington and he was dux of Hutt Valley High School in 1957. He earned his Bachelor of Science and in 1962 he earned a Masters of Science with first class honours in Mathematics, all from Victoria University of Wellington. The bachelor's degree was from the University of New Zealand, as the constituent colleges of UNZ, of which Victoria ...
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Mary L. Boas
#27521
Overall Influence
1917 - 2010 (93 years)
Mary Layne Boas was an American mathematician and physics professor best known as the author of Mathematical Methods in the Physical Sciences , an undergraduate textbook that was still widely used in college classrooms as of 1999.
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Michel Deza
#40069
Overall Influence
1939 - 2016 (77 years)
Michel Marie Deza was a Soviet and French mathematician, specializing in combinatorics, discrete geometry and graph theory. He was the retired director of research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research , the vice president of the European Academy of Sciences, a research professor at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, and one of the three founding editors-in-chief of the European Journal of Combinatorics.
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Dennis Barden
#48198
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Dennis Barden is a mathematician at the University of Cambridge working in the fields of geometry and topology. He is known for his classification of the simply connected compact 5-manifolds and, together with Barry Mazur and John R. Stallings, for having proved the s-cobordism theorem. Barden received his Ph.D. from Cambridge in 1964 under the supervision of C. T. C. Wall.
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Eva Viehmann
#49246
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (44 years)
Eva Viehmann is a German mathematician who holds a professorial chair in the arithmetic geometry and representation theory research group at the University of Münster. Before that she was a professor working on arithmetic geometry at the Technical University of Munich.
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Guido Mislin
#46405
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Guido Mislin is a Swiss mathematician, academic and researcher. He is a Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at ETH Zurich. He is also associated with Ohio State University as a guest at Mathematics Department.
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Cosma Shalizi
#7560
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Cosma Rohilla Shalizi is an associate professor in the Department of Statistics at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Life Cosma Rohilla Shalizi is of Indian Tamil, Afghan and Italian heritage and was born in Boston, where he lived for the first two years of his life. He grew up in Bethesda, Maryland.
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Martin Dunwoody
#37823
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Martin John Dunwoody is an emeritus professor of Mathematics at the University of Southampton, England. He earned his PhD in 1964 from the Australian National University. He held positions at the University of Sussex before becoming a professor at the University of Southampton in 1992. He has been emeritus professor since 2003.
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Robert M. Thrall
#27979
Overall Influence
1914 - 2006 (92 years)
Robert McDowell Thrall was an American mathematician and a pioneer of operations research. Biography Thrall graduated in 1935 with BA from Illinois College and in 1937 with MA and PhD in mathematics from the University of Illinois. From 1937 to 1969 he was a professor of mathematics at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. In 1969 he became a professor in the newly founded department of Mathematical Sciences at Rice University. He chaired the department from 1969 to 1974. In 1977 he received a joint appointment in Rice's newly established Graduate School of Business, where he taught decision analysis to MBA Students.
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Selmer M. Johnson
#13939
Overall Influence
1916 - 1996 (80 years)
Selmer Martin Johnson was an American mathematician, a researcher at the RAND Corporation. Biography Johnson was born on May 21, 1916, in Buhl, Minnesota. He earned a B.A. and then an M.A. in mathematics from the University of Minnesota in 1938 and 1940 respectively. World War II interrupted Johnson's mathematical studies: he enlisted in the United States Air Force, earning the rank of major. While serving, he also earned an M.S. in meteorology from New York University in 1942. After the war, Johnson returned to graduate study in mathematics at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, ...
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Tamás Szőnyi
#40402
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Tamás Szőnyi is a Hungarian mathematician, doing research in discrete mathematics, particularly finite geometry and algebraic coding theory. He is full professor at the department of computer science of the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, vice director of the Institute of Mathematics, and vice chairman of the mathematical committee of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In 2001, he received the Doctor of Science title from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Szőnyi created a successful school in finite geometry. He has done influential work on blocking sets and the polynomial method.
Go to Profile#2165
Eva Bayer-Fluckiger
#37095
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Eva Bayer-Fluckiger is a Hungarian and Swiss mathematician. She is an Emmy Noether Professor Emeritus at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. She has worked on several topics in topology, algebra and number theory, e.g. on the theory of knots, on lattices, on quadratic forms and on Galois cohomology. Along with Raman Parimala, she proved Serre's conjecture II regarding the Galois cohomology of a simply-connected semisimple algebraic group when such a group is of classical type.
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Michael H. Albert
#33896
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Michael Henry Albert is a mathematician and computer scientist, originally from Canada, and currently a professor in the computer science department at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. His varied research interests include combinatorics and combinatorial game theory.
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Richard Bandler
#684
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Richard Wayne Bandler is an American consultant in the field of self-help. With John Grinder, he founded the neuro-linguistic programming approach to psychotherapy in the 1970s. Education and background Bandler was born in Teaneck, New Jersey and attended high school in Sunnyvale, California. He has stated that he was beaten as a child so badly that every bone in his body was broken. After his parents separated, he moved with his mother and stayed mostly in and around San Francisco. Bandler obtained a BA degree in philosophy and psychology from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 19...
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Albrecht Beutelspacher
#41479
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Albrecht Beutelspacher is a German mathematician and founder of the Mathematikum. He is a professor emeritus at the University of Giessen, where he held the chair for geometry and discrete mathematics from 1988 to 2018.
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Nassif Ghoussoub
#40618
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Nassif A. Ghoussoub is a Canadian mathematician working in the fields of non-linear analysis and partial differential equations. He is a Professor of Mathematics and a Distinguished University Scholar at the University of British Columbia.
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Graham Everest
#44991
Overall Influence
1957 - 2010 (53 years)
Graham Robert Everest was a British mathematician working on arithmetic dynamics and recursive equations in number theory. Life Everest studied at Bedford College of the University of London where he completed a Ph.D. in 1983 under the supervision of Colin J. Bushnell of King's College London He joined the faculty of the University of East Anglia in 1983 as a lecturer and spent his academic career there.
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Greg Kuperberg
#20996
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Greg Kuperberg is a Polish-born American mathematician known for his contributions to geometric topology, quantum algebra, and combinatorics. Kuperberg is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Davis.
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Miranda Cheng
#29542
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Miranda Chih-Ning Cheng is a Taiwanese-born and Dutch-educated mathematician and theoretical physicist who works as an assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam. She is known for formulating the umbral moonshine conjectures and for her work on the connections between K3 surfaces and string theory.
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David Borwein
#36340
Overall Influence
1924 - 2021 (97 years)
David Borwein was a Lithuanian-born Canadian mathematician, known for his research in the summability theory of series and integrals. He also did work in measure theory and probability theory, number theory, and approximate subgradients and coderivatives. He latterly collaborated with his son, Jonathan Borwein, and with B.A. Mares Jr. on the properties of single-variable and many-variable sinc integrals.
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Raymond J. Carroll
#37503
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Raymond James Carroll is an American statistician, and Distinguished Professor of statistics, nutrition and toxicology at Texas A&M University. He is a recipient of 1988 COPSS Presidents' Award and 2002 R. A. Fisher Lectureship. He has made fundamental contributions to measurement error model, nonparametric and semiparametric modeling.
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Roger Horn
#40919
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Roger Alan Horn is an American mathematician specializing in matrix analysis. He was research professor of mathematics at the University of Utah. He is known for formulating the Bateman–Horn conjecture with Paul T. Bateman on the density of prime number values generated by systems of polynomials. His books Matrix Analysis and Topics in Matrix Analysis, co-written with Charles R. Johnson, are standard texts in advanced linear algebra.
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Mark Vishik
#39529
Overall Influence
1921 - 2012 (91 years)
Mark Vishik was a Soviet mathematician who worked in the field of partial differential equations. Life and work Lwów In Lwów, Mark Vishik visited the fifth gymnasium , which specialized in physics and mathematics. His mathematical talent was encouraged by a method of teaching, which left it up to the students to find mathematical proofs. He began studying mathematics at the University of Lviv in December 1939, at the time when the Lwów school mathematics was still active. Among his teachers were Juliusz Schauder, Stanisław Mazur, Bronislaw Knaster, and Edward Szpilrajn, who organized a stude...
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Dmitry Okhotsimsky
#18852
Overall Influence
1921 - 2005 (84 years)
Dmitry Yevgenyevich Okhotsimsky was a Russian engineer in the former Soviet space program who pioneered the studies in robotics, controls, and space ballistics. He wrote fundamental works in applied celestial mechanics, spaceflight dynamics and robotics.
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Mike Develin
#38356
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (44 years)
Michael Lee Develin is an American mathematician known for his work in combinatorics and discrete geometry. Early life Mike Develin was born in Hobart, Tasmania. He moved to the United States with his Korean mother, living in New York City. He attended Stuyvesant High School, where he was captain of the math team, and entered Harvard University at the age of 16. At 22, he received his PhD from UC Berkeley, doing his dissertation on Topics in Discrete Geometry. He was awarded the 2003 American Institute of Mathematics five-year fellowship.
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Alexey Chervonenkis
#8385
Overall Influence
1938 - 2014 (76 years)
Alexey Yakovlevich Chervonenkis was a Soviet and Russian mathematician. Along with Vladimir Vapnik, he was one of the main developers of the Vapnik–Chervonenkis theory, also known as the "fundamental theory of learning" - an important part of computational learning theory. Chervonenkis held joint appointments with the Russian Academy of Sciences and Royal Holloway, University of London.
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John Leech
#44629
Overall Influence
1926 - 1992 (66 years)
John Leech was a British mathematician working in number theory, geometry and combinatorial group theory. He is best known for his discovery of the Leech lattice in 1965. He also discovered Ta in 1957. Leech was married to Jenifer Haselgrove, a British radio scientist.
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Howard Masur
#48261
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Howard Alan Masur is an American mathematician who works on topology, geometry, and combinatorial group theory. Biography Masur was an invited speaker at the 1994 International Congress of Mathematicians in Zürich. and is a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
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Esther Szekeres
#26004
Overall Influence
1910 - 2005 (95 years)
Esther Szekeres was a Hungarian–Australian mathematician. Biography Esther Klein was born to Ignaz Klein in a Jewish family in Budapest, Kingdom of Hungary in 1910. As a young physics student in Budapest, Klein was a member of a group of Hungarians including Paul Erdős, George Szekeres and Pál Turán that convened over interesting mathematical problems.
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Lars Hesselholt
#47302
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Lars Hesselholt is a Danish mathematician who works as a professor of mathematics at Nagoya University in Japan, as well as holding a temporary position as Niels Bohr Professor at the University of Copenhagen. His research interests include homotopy theory, algebraic K-theory, and arithmetic algebraic geometry.
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Igor Ansoff
#2352
Overall Influence
1918 - 2002 (84 years)
Harry Igor Ansoff was a Russian American applied mathematician and business manager. He is known as one of the fathers of strategic management. Biography Early life Igor Ansoff was born in Vladivostok, Russia, on December 12, 1918. His father was an American-born Russian from Evansville, Indiana and his mother was a Russian from Moscow.
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Jan-Erik Roos
#49942
Overall Influence
1935 - 2017 (82 years)
Jan-Erik Ingvar Roos was a Swedish mathematician whose research interests were in abelian category theory, homological algebra, and related areas. He was born in Halmstad, in the province of Halland on the Swedish west coast. Roos enrolled at Lund University in 1954, and started studying mathematics with Lars Gårding in 1957. Under Gårding's direction he wrote a thesis on ordinary differential equation, and graduated in 1958 with a licentiate degree. Later that year he went to Paris on a doctoral scholarship; there, he gravitated towards the mathematical environment at the Institut Henri Poincaré, and the various seminars held there.
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Anneli Cahn Lax
#36320
Overall Influence
1922 - 1999 (77 years)
Anneli Cahn Lax was an American mathematician, who was known for being an editor of the Mathematics Association of America's New Mathematical Library Series, and for her work in reforming mathematics education with the inclusion of language skills. Anneli Lax received a bachelor's degree in 1942 from Adelphi University and her doctorate in 1956. She was a professor of mathematics at New York University's Courant Institute. She was married to the mathematician Peter Lax.
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Cristina Pereyra
#45913
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
María Cristina Pereyra is a Venezuelan mathematician. She is a professor of mathematics and statistics at the University of New Mexico, and the author of several books on wavelets and harmonic analysis. Pereyra was an American Mathematical Society Council member at large from 2019 - 2021.
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Louis Billera
#36449
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Louis Joseph Billera is a Professor of Mathematics at Cornell University. Career Billera completed his B.S. at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1964. He earned his Ph.D. from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 1968, under the joint supervision of Moses Richardson and Michel Balinski.
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Ramachandran Balasubramanian
#22503
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Ramachandran Balasubramanian is an Indian mathematician and was Director of the Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Chennai, India. He is known for his work in number theory, which includes settling the final g case of Waring's problem in 1986.
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Peter J. Bickel
#30986
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Peter John Bickel is an American statistician and Professor of Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley. Education and career Bickel studied physics at the California Institute of Technology. He graduated from University of California, Berkeley, with a Ph.D., in 1963, where he studied under Erich Leo Lehmann.
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Alessandro Figà Talamanca
#35419
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Alessandro Figà Talamanca was an Italian mathematician who had been given several prestigious tasks, both in Italy and abroad. Several times, he took part in managing the Italian University system and shared his opinions in newspapers, such as La Repubblica. He was a close friend of Carlo Pucci, a mathematician who spent most of his energy in improving the method of teaching maths in Italy, and the management of Italian Maths Departments. From 1995 to 2003, Figà Talamanca, successor to Pucci, was President of the Istituto, and he continued what Pucci had set up. He was also Vice-President of...
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Richard L. Bishop
#50054
Overall Influence
1931 - 2019 (88 years)
Richard Lawrence Bishop was an American mathematician who specialized in differential geometry and taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Bishop went to Case Institute of Technology as an undergraduate, earning a B.S. in 1954. Next he earned his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1959, and immediately joined the UIUC faculty, where he stayed until his retirement in 1997. His thesis, On Imbeddings and Holonomy, was supervised by Isadore Singer. At UIUC, his doctoral students included future UIUC colleague Stephanie B. Alexander. He is the author of Geome...
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Bernt Øksendal
#31395
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Bernt Karsten Øksendal is a Norwegian mathematician. He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Oslo, working under Otte Hustad. He obtained his PhD from University of California, Los Angeles in 1971; his thesis was titled Peak Sets and Interpolation Sets for Some Algebras of Analytic Functions and was supervised by Theodore Gamelin. In 1991, he was appointed as a professor at the University of Oslo. In 1992, he was appointed as an adjunct professor at the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration, Bergen, Norway.
Go to Profile#2194
Raphaël Rouquier
#31700
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Raphaël Alexis Marcel Rouquier is a French mathematician and a professor of mathematics at UCLA. Education Rouquier was born in Étampes, France. Rouquier studied at the École Normale Supérieure from 1988 to 1989 and from 1989 to 1990 for a DEA in mathematics under the direction of Michel Broué, where he continued to study for his PhD. Rouquier spent the second year of his PhD study at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of J. G. Thompson.
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June Barrow-Green
#39420
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
June Barrow-Green is a professor of History of Mathematics at the Open University and a visiting professor at the London School of Economics. Education Barrow-Green obtained a BSc Hons in Mathematics in 1986 and an MSc in Mathematical Physics in 1989, both from King's College London. In 1993 she gained a PhD in mathematics from the Open University, under supervision of Jeremy Gray, on Poincaré and the Three Body Problem.
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Jeff Dinitz
#44608
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Jeffrey Howard Dinitz is an American mathematician who taught combinatorics at the University of Vermont. He is best known for proposing the Dinitz conjecture, which became a major theorem. Early life and education Dinitz was born in 1952 in Brooklyn, New York City, New York.
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Talithia Williams
#31612
Overall Influence
Talithia D. Williams is an American statistician and mathematician at Harvey Mudd College who researches the spatiotemporal structure of data. She was the first black woman to achieve tenure at Harvey Mudd College. Williams is an advocate for engaging more African Americans in engineering and science.
Go to Profile#2198
Yves Colin de Verdière
#28529
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Yves Colin de Verdière is a French mathematician. Life He studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris in the late 1960s, obtained his Ph.D. in 1973, and then spent the bulk of his working life as faculty at Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble. He retired in December 2005.
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Nathan Mendelsohn
#31188
Overall Influence
1917 - 2006 (89 years)
Nathan Saul Mendelsohn, was an American-born mathematician who lived and worked in Canada. Mendelsohn was a researcher in several areas of discrete mathematics, including group theory and combinatorics.
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Leo Goodman
#39335
Overall Influence
1928 - 2020 (92 years)
Leo Aria Goodman was an American statistician. He was known particularly for developing statistical methods for the social sciences, including statistical methods for analyzing categorical data and data from statistical surveys.
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